What Are The Extremes When They Become More Common

 We seem to be seeing a growing number of extremes and Climate Change is producing more than its fair share. Droughts, downpours, Category-5 Hurricanes, wildfires (Climate Change lengthens the wildfire season), groups of tornados, and disappearing ice seem to be happening both more intensely and with greater frequency. An old saying aptly metaphorically describes what we have been seeing in the 21st century: 'When it rains, it pours.'

We now have to start adjusting to these Climate Change caused extremes if we wish to keep some semblance of order in our world. Unfortunate, adjusting, or change, is not the strong suit for many of the world's privileged--and that includes me too.

But if only Climate Change was the only cause of the extremes we witness or experience today. We are now facing extremes in human behavior. 

In his Black To The Future comedy routine, Lewis Black complained truthfully in jest that his job as a comedian was over. That was because his niche of being crazier that what is in the world has now been outsourced to reality. Unfortunately, he said that in 2016. And by today's standards, 2016 was mild .

The year 2020 had its own mild start. But despite that start, 2020 was the craziest  years with the pandemic and the extreme, but necessary, measures used by many nations in the world. Then there was the election and the challenges to the election. There was a President and his followers who could not seem to grasp multiple realities from Climate Change to Covid to the existence of systemic racism to to the results of the Presidential election. And they took the whole nation along for the ride that claimed to be headed toward the reality but it always managed to skirt it.

As for 2021, it was somewhat like the month of March to 2020 in that 2021 came in like a lion. However, we can't say that it is going out like a lamb. Rather, it seems to be exiting like a bear in a restless hibernation. World leaders flirting with world war as they seem to threaten takeovers of other nations, a relatively high percentage of people refusing to receive a vaccine that would give good, though not perfect, protection to the virus, gangs participating in smash and grab robberies, increases in certain kinds of violent crime, the ongoing denial of systemic racism, international hackers causing great damage supply chains, hospitals, police depts and so on with ransomware. And we still have quite a few too many working politicians who have refused to believe reality.  It seems like a growing number of people are losing almost all self-control over their actions.

Of course why we describe 2021 as having come in like a lion is the January 6 insurrection. A President who was out of control inspired a significant number of his followers to go out of control in order to stop the Constitutional process of counting the electoral ballots.

And with all that craziness around us, we must ask ourselves what we can do to reverse what's happening. Well, there is not much we can do to  change the actions of other nations, but we can try to address the problems that are in our own nation. But to do that, we must be willing to critically look at the status quo to see what needs to change. And there is that word 'change' again.

See, if we are not willing to change, then we will hampered by a conflict of interest when looking at both the past and the present. We will be hampered because if we are not willing to change, we will have harder time acknowledging that the American way of life has significantly contributed to many of the out of control actions we see, hear or read about today. The only responsible response to such an acknowledgment is to change. But if one has already refused to change, one is more resistant to changing what must be changed about the American way of life.

And so for as long as we are not willing to change, we are stuck in kind of a stalemate except there is one difference. In chess, a stalemate produces no winners or losers. In real life, when a stalemate prevents us from making necessary changes, then our world becomes like a ticking time bomb. We don't know when the bomb will explode, but for as long as nothing is done to defuse the bomb, we know that it will eventually explode. And when that happens, all of us will be put in the same boat as having lost. Some will lose more than others, but all will lose.